In order to continue to provide leadership within the national research community in the area of software development for image analysis, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) is currently revising and updating its open-source image processing application programmers interface (API), known as the Insight Toolkit (ITK). NLM has determined that it is time to revisit the foundations of the toolkit to assure its viability for the next ten years. In the intervening decade since the original design of ITK, computing technologies have made radical advances including the advent of multi-core microprocessors, 64-bit CPU architectures, and a proliferation of graphics processing units (GPUs) capable of general purpose computing. NLM is in the process of funding a major new software release, ITK version 4.0 (ITK-v4), which will take advantage of these emerging computing technologies.